We’re always looking for sandboxes where we can explore novel ways of supporting playful, scientific investigation—and developing the tools and materials that requires. Got a lead on something that might interest us? Let us know!

2012–

Somerville STEAM Academy

Over the past year we’ve been working with the City of Somerville—along with local families, businesses, and institutions—to develop a proposal for a new high school in Somerville, an Innovation School extending the themes behind sprout’s work: project-based learning, computational thinking, and a deep integration with the community. Our prospectus was unanimously approved in the summer of 2012, and we’re now in the midst of developing the more detailed Innovation Plan for submission early 2013.

2009–

sprout Spaghetti Dinners

Inspired by the community events of Great Small Works, this dinner theater series brings people together around food, music, & performance united by a monthly theme. Seeking to blur the line between art and academia, the series asks academics to approach their lectures as performance and puppeteers to cast their theater as pedagogy. Each month, we bring folks together around a program of presentations & performances which at their best help us understand a piece of everyday life from a new perspective.

sprout grew from our collective desire for rich, social learning experiences. That desire has become a driving interest in the design of tools & media to support creative, scientific investigation. Interested in working with us? Let us know!

Compelled by computation’s potential to transform learning, Alec cares about the tools we use to think & explore. Before sprout, he studied math & physics at MIT and co-founded nublabs, an electromechanical design firm where he built learning tools & toys.

Shaunalynn cares about what makes for a healthy learning communities. The deep, social learning experiences she encountered making music have inspired her to approach science in the same spirit. Before sprout, she studied environmental engineering & creative writing at MIT.

Nagle’s passion is building environments for sustainable inquiry—for both kids & adults. Before sprout he studied theoretical math at MIT and then co-founded Camp Kaleidoscope (now Parts & Crafts) and the Kaleidoscope Homeschooling Center.

Here’s where we write about our work in an attempt to better understand our experiences, both personal & professional. Related: over at our tumblr, you can find something of a scrapbook of inspiring and provocative tidbits we run across.

John Holt and Paul Tough are a half-century apart. Both were interested in children and how they learned. One wrote a book called How Children Learn, the other a book called How Children Succeed. Their juxtaposition has a lot to tell us about how we think about and treat our young people.

In 1967, John Holt published How Children Learn. In 2013, Paul Tough published How Children Succeed. Holt was following up on the publication of his 1964 book, How Children Fail. Beginning in 1952, Holt taught elementary and middle…

Educators talk a lot about ‘personalization.’ Is the animating purpose of “personalization” in to render students legible? If it is, could Sal Khan take the Hippocratic oath?

inBloom’s mission is to “inform & involve each student & teacher with data & tools designed to personalize learning.” Focus on that word, “personalize.” At the moment, this is an exciting word for many people in education. In this crowd, there is a common distinction between ‘transmission’ and ‘construction’ as metaphors…

For some school is a place and others it is a process. For all, it is an institution. And institutions need rituals. To most, these rituals seem the mechanics enabling school’s nominal goal: knowledge transfer. But habits can define us, and perhaps the cumulative effects of our time’s texture are more important than how we use that time in the first place.

Every morning, I brush my teeth. “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven.” I brush in multiples of seven. I shift the toothbrush over one tooth. “One, two, three, four, five, six seven.” And I repeat….

“A good educational system should have three purposes: provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known.”

… interested to see more of what inspires us? Check out our tumblr, a scrapbook of visions of the future of learning.